Kim Jong Un’s Face Probably Won’t Get Melted Off in THE INTERVIEW

Share:

Note: This article may contain mild spoilers for The Interview, so if you’re planning on seeing that movie and want to know literally nothing about it, you should probably stop reading right meow.

Remember when North Korea got up in arms about the Seth Rogen/James Franco assassination comedy, The Interview? The Democratic People’s Republic wasn’t all that happy with a film about two newsmen coming to their country to murder the current dear leader, Kim Jong Un (Randall Park). Well apparently someone at The Interview distributor Sony is taking the threats seriously, with some edits underway for the film in advance of its Christmas day release.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, editors and digital artists are hard at work nipping and tucking bits of the comedy, even if its creators and stars have largely waved off threats from the nuke-armed nation. The Hollywood Reporter‘s sources are saying that while some scenes of graphic violence against Kim Jong Un are being changed or scaled back, the rush to get in the edits is way stranger than you might think.

Sony has people going in and scrubbing out military buttons and decorations honoring the country’s leader seen in the film – those depictions on screen would be considered blasphemous by members of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. A face-melting scene is just getting trimmed for pacing and comedy. THR‘s Sony source maintains that the Japanese-owned studio isn’t making the move as a bow to political pressure, which kind of makes sense – killing Kim Jong Un a little less graphically isn’t going to be considered any less offensive than full-on face murder.

I’m curious about this thing with the military decorations – the only time I’ve seen members of the North Korean military on screen is in documentaries,but at no point were any of the guards escorting camera crews or senior officials wandering into the view of the cameras were wearing buttons honoring either Kims Jong-Il or Jong Un.